In the last few decades, there has been much research regarding the importance of social prestige... more In the last few decades, there has been much research regarding the importance of social prestige in shaping the social structure of small-scale societies. While recent studies show that social prestige may have important health consequences, little is known about the extent to which prestige translates into actual in-person interactions and proximity, even though the level of integration into such real-life social networks has been shown to have important health consequences. Here, we determine the extent to which two different domains of social prestige, popularity (being perceived as a friend by others), and hunting reputation (being perceived as a good hunter), translate into GPS-derived in- and out-of-camp proximity networks in a group of egalitarian hunter-gatherer men, the Hadza. We show that popularity and hunting reputation differ in the extent to which they are translated into time spent physically close to each other. Moreover, our findings suggest that in-camp proximity ...
This is the fixed version of an article made available by an organization that acts as a publishe... more This is the fixed version of an article made available by an organization that acts as a publisher by formally and exclusively declaring the article "published". If it is an "early release" article (formally identified as being published even before the compilation of a volume issue and assignment of associated metadata), it is citable via some permanent identifier(s), and final copy-editing, proof corrections, layout, and typesetting have been applied.
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, wearing protective facial masks has become a divisi... more Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, wearing protective facial masks has become a divisive issue, yet little is known about what drives differences in mask wearing across individuals. We surveyed 711 people around the world, asking about mask wearing and several other variables. We found that people who reported greater perceived risk of infection, stress, and those with greater consideration of future consequences reported wearing masks more often during in-person interactions. Participants who knew more people who had been infected and those who lived in postal codes with higher prevalence of COVID-19 perceived their risk of infection to be higher and reported greater pandemic-related stress. Perceived risk of infection and pandemic-related stress were higher overall in women and those reporting greater future-orientedness. Finally, participants who were more politically conservative reported lower perceived risk of becoming infected and lower stress than those who were m...
Do crises bring people together or pull them apart? Here we examine how people’s willingness to h... more Do crises bring people together or pull them apart? Here we examine how people’s willingness to help others and their perceived interdependence with others changed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and assess what factors are associated with any change. We collected data at 4 time points from the same cohort of 497 paid participants, starting on March 6th, before the pandemic was declared, through April 2. We found that perceived interdependence with neighbors and with humanity increased over time on multiple measures. However, regarding cooperation, agreement with the statement that helping someone in need “is the right thing to do” decreased over time (towards both a neighbor and a citizen of another country). Although the changes per time period were small for some of these effects, cumulatively they were non-trivial (ranging from a .33 to a .75 change on a 7 point likert scale). There was no change over time in participants' reported willingness to help somebody in their neighbo...
According to Turnbull's 1972 ethnography The Mountain People, the Ik of Uganda had a culture of s... more According to Turnbull's 1972 ethnography The Mountain People, the Ik of Uganda had a culture of selfishness that made them uncooperative. His claims contrast with two widely accepted principles in evolutionary biology, that humans cooperate on larger scales than other species and that culture is an important facilitator of such cooperation. We use recently collected data to examine Ik culture and its influence on Ik behaviour. Turnbull's observations of selfishness were not necessarily inaccurate but they occurred during a severe famine. Cooperation re-emerged when people once again had enough resources to share. Accordingly, Ik donations in unframed Dictator Games are on par with average donations in Dictator Games played by people around the world. Furthermore, Ik culture includes traits that encourage sharing with those in need and a belief in supernatural punishment of selfishness. When these traits are used to frame Dictator Games, the average amounts given by Ik players increase. Turnbull's claim that the Ik have a culture of selfishness can be rejected. Cooperative norms are resilient, and the consensus among scholars that humans are remarkably cooperative and that human cooperation is supported by culture can remain intact.
Risk management is a problem humans have faced throughout history and across societies. One way t... more Risk management is a problem humans have faced throughout history and across societies. One way to manage risk is to transfer it to other parties through formal and informal insurance systems. One informal method of self-insurance is limited risk pooling, where individuals can ask for help only when in need. Models suggest that need-based transfer systems may require coordination and common knowledge to be effective. To explore the impact of common knowledge on social coordination and risk pooling in volatile environments, we designed and ran a Risk Pooling Game. We compared participants who played the game with no advance priming or framing to participants who read one of two texts describing realworld systems of risk pooling. Players in the primed games engaged in more repetitive asking and repetitive giving than those in the control games. Players in the primed games also gave more in response to requests and were more likely to respond positively to requests than players in the control games. In addition, players in the primed games were more tolerant of wide differences between what the two players gave and received. These results suggest that the priming texts led players to pay less attention to debt and repayment and more attention to the survival of the other player, and thus to more risk pooling. These results are consistent with findings from fieldwork in small-scale societies that suggest that humans use need-based transfer systems to pool risk when environmental volatility leads to needs with unpredictable timing. Models suggest that the need-based transfer strategy observed in this experiment can outperform debt-based strategies. The results of the present study suggest that the suite of behaviors associated with need-based transfers is an easily triggered part of the human behavioral repertoire.
Fitness interdependence is the degree to which two or more organisms influence each other's s... more Fitness interdependence is the degree to which two or more organisms influence each other's success in replicating their genes. Identity fusion may be a proximate mechanism that aligns behavior with fitness interdependence. Although identity fusion may usually lead to behaviors that are fitness enhancing, in evolutionarily novel environments, it may be hijacked in ways that are highly detrimental to fitness.
Understanding cooperation through fitness interdependence Some acts of human cooperation are not ... more Understanding cooperation through fitness interdependence Some acts of human cooperation are not easily explained by traditional models of kinship or reciprocity. Fitness interdependence may provide a unifying conceptual framework, in which cooperation arises from the mutual dependence for survival or reproduction, as occurs among mates, risk-pooling partnerships and brothers-in-arms.
economic processes and cultural norms. In the first section, we describe how inter-household wate... more economic processes and cultural norms. In the first section, we describe how inter-household water sharing can vary in different livelihood contexts. In the second section, we review the material conditions, socioeconomic processes, and cultural norms that shape water sharing across contexts. Finally, in the third section, we highlight key gaps and identify new directions for research on inter-household water sharing. Our goal is to provide an overview and state of knowledge on water sharing, and explore the proposition that water sharing, while often instrumental and need-based, may also symbolically mark the performance of social relations and cultural identities. Section 1: Water Sharing in Four Livelihood Contexts To start, we present an overview of water sharing among households in different livelihood contexts-hunter-gatherer, pastoral, agricultural, and urban-with some attention to their historical trajectories. This section gives concrete examples to illustrate the rich range of water sharing practices that exist globally. Further, these snapshots illustrate how cross-cutting factors (addressed in Section 2) shape water sharing practices in each context. Water sharing in hunter-gatherer livelihood contexts Human ancestors lived by hunting and gathering until the Holocene 10,000 years ago (Cummings et al., 2014); today, livelihoods based on hunting and gathering are increasingly integrated into mixed economies (e.g., BurnSilver et al., 2016). Hunter-gatherers have inhabited mostly seasonal niches from the Arctic to the southern-most points of the continents of South America, Africa, and Australasia. Historically, availability of water has been important for structuring the seasonal rounds of migration. Water may be fetched from wells, springs, rock pools, tree hollows, streams, lakes, or melted from ice or snow. Fetching may be done by women, men, or children, depending on the distance of the water distance from the settlement. Water sharing between households in many hunter-gatherer societies follows a norm that, like food, resources that are widely available and can be collected by any non-disabled person will be shared within the household and with guests (Gould, 1969). Close kin provide food and water for those who are old, sick, or suffering from sorrow, while all visitors to a household have access to water as basic hospitality (Wiessner, 1996). When water is readily available, it may be the case that no particular significance is placed on water sharing-in this way water is equated with life and shared like the air. By contrast, in desert environments such as the Kalahari of southern Africa, for example, when surface water or wells have run dry, households are expected only to provide for immediate kin in need (Silberbauer, 1981). The need for access to water sources in others' territories during times of scarcity has led to the development of some very complex social institutions in the Kalahari (Heinz & Keuthmann, 1994). For example, some Ju/'hoansi Bushman groups formed gift-giving partnerships called xaro that were passed down over generations so that xaro partners could visit one another and stay in each other's territories utilizing water and food resources until conditions improved at home (Wiessner, 1986). Water sharing relationships, then, may be formed within households, across households within a community or settlement, and across broader territories. Population growth, reduced mobility, environmental change (e.g., climate change, water diversions), and political change (e.g., fortification of international boundaries, land and water grabbing) may alter the abundance or quality of historic water sources such that many hunter-gatherers no longer have consistent access to clean water sources today. Yet, there is insufficient research to determine how such changes might affect water sharing in hunter-gatherer communities. Understanding the complex institutional arrangements and norms in these contexts presents a fruitful opportunity for future study. Water sharing in pastoral and agro-pastoral livelihood contexts For millennia, pastoralists have migrated with their livestock in search of pasture and water (Smith, 2013). Migration has long served as a coping strategy to deal with inherent intermittent resource scarcities common in rangeland ecosystems. But over the last few decades, pastoral livelihoods have transformed for a number of reasons, including increasing pressure to sedentarize, land enclosure, and
Because parental care is expected to depend on the fitness returns generated by each unit of inve... more Because parental care is expected to depend on the fitness returns generated by each unit of investment, it should be sensitive to both offspring condition and parental ability to invest. The Trivers-Willard Hypothesis (TWH) predicts that parents who are in good condition will bias investment towards sons, while parents who are in poor condition will bias investment towards daughters because high-quality sons are expected to out-reproduce high quality daughters, while low-quality daughters are expected to out-reproduce low quality sons. We report results from an online experiment testing the Trivers-Willard effect by measuring implicit and explicit psychological preferences and behaviorally implied preferences for sons or daughters both as a function of their social and economic status and in the aftermath of a priming task designed to make participants feel wealthy or poor. We find only limited support for predictions derived from the TWH and instead find that women have strong pre...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Sep 10, 2018
Human foragers are obligately group-living, and their high dependence on mutual aid is believed t... more Human foragers are obligately group-living, and their high dependence on mutual aid is believed to have characterized our species' social evolution. It was therefore a central adaptive problem for our ancestors to avoid damaging the willingness of other group members to render them assistance. Cognitively, this requires a predictive map of the degree to which others would devalue the individual based on each of various possible acts. With such a map, an individual can avoid socially costly behaviors by anticipating how much audience devaluation a potential action (e.g., stealing) would cause and weigh this against the action's direct payoff (e.g., acquiring). The shame system manifests all of the functional properties required to solve this adaptive problem, with the aversive intensity of shame encoding the social cost. Previous data from three Western(ized) societies indicated that the shame evoked when the individual anticipates committing various acts closely tracks the m...
DESPOTISM AND DIFFERENTIAL REPRODUCTION: A DARWINIAN VIEW OF HISTORY by Laura L. Betzig Hawthorne... more DESPOTISM AND DIFFERENTIAL REPRODUCTION: A DARWINIAN VIEW OF HISTORY by Laura L. Betzig Hawthorne, New York: Aldine, 1986. 171 pp., $24.95
Ethnology an International Journal of Cultural and Social Anthropology, 2002
Between 1925 and 1936, the Mukogodo of Kenya changed from Cushitie-speaking foragers to Maa-speak... more Between 1925 and 1936, the Mukogodo of Kenya changed from Cushitie-speaking foragers to Maa-speaking pastoralists. This rapid transition took place in the midst of competing views of Mukogodo ethnic identity. To Maa-speakers, Mukogodo were lowstatus il-tnrrobo. To British colonialists, Mukogodo were true Dorobo, victims of more powerful agricultural and pastoralist groups. Although British administrators fashioned a set of policies designed to protect Mukogodo from such groups, other British policies inadvertently contributed to the Mukogodo acquisition of Maasai subsistence patterns, language, and culture. Mukogodo themselves strategically used a Dorobo identity to manipulate the British while striving to lose the stigma of the il-lorrobu label and achieve acceptance among Maa-speakers as true Maasai.
In the last few decades, there has been much research regarding the importance of social prestige... more In the last few decades, there has been much research regarding the importance of social prestige in shaping the social structure of small-scale societies. While recent studies show that social prestige may have important health consequences, little is known about the extent to which prestige translates into actual in-person interactions and proximity, even though the level of integration into such real-life social networks has been shown to have important health consequences. Here, we determine the extent to which two different domains of social prestige, popularity (being perceived as a friend by others), and hunting reputation (being perceived as a good hunter), translate into GPS-derived in- and out-of-camp proximity networks in a group of egalitarian hunter-gatherer men, the Hadza. We show that popularity and hunting reputation differ in the extent to which they are translated into time spent physically close to each other. Moreover, our findings suggest that in-camp proximity ...
This is the fixed version of an article made available by an organization that acts as a publishe... more This is the fixed version of an article made available by an organization that acts as a publisher by formally and exclusively declaring the article "published". If it is an "early release" article (formally identified as being published even before the compilation of a volume issue and assignment of associated metadata), it is citable via some permanent identifier(s), and final copy-editing, proof corrections, layout, and typesetting have been applied.
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, wearing protective facial masks has become a divisi... more Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, wearing protective facial masks has become a divisive issue, yet little is known about what drives differences in mask wearing across individuals. We surveyed 711 people around the world, asking about mask wearing and several other variables. We found that people who reported greater perceived risk of infection, stress, and those with greater consideration of future consequences reported wearing masks more often during in-person interactions. Participants who knew more people who had been infected and those who lived in postal codes with higher prevalence of COVID-19 perceived their risk of infection to be higher and reported greater pandemic-related stress. Perceived risk of infection and pandemic-related stress were higher overall in women and those reporting greater future-orientedness. Finally, participants who were more politically conservative reported lower perceived risk of becoming infected and lower stress than those who were m...
Do crises bring people together or pull them apart? Here we examine how people’s willingness to h... more Do crises bring people together or pull them apart? Here we examine how people’s willingness to help others and their perceived interdependence with others changed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and assess what factors are associated with any change. We collected data at 4 time points from the same cohort of 497 paid participants, starting on March 6th, before the pandemic was declared, through April 2. We found that perceived interdependence with neighbors and with humanity increased over time on multiple measures. However, regarding cooperation, agreement with the statement that helping someone in need “is the right thing to do” decreased over time (towards both a neighbor and a citizen of another country). Although the changes per time period were small for some of these effects, cumulatively they were non-trivial (ranging from a .33 to a .75 change on a 7 point likert scale). There was no change over time in participants' reported willingness to help somebody in their neighbo...
According to Turnbull's 1972 ethnography The Mountain People, the Ik of Uganda had a culture of s... more According to Turnbull's 1972 ethnography The Mountain People, the Ik of Uganda had a culture of selfishness that made them uncooperative. His claims contrast with two widely accepted principles in evolutionary biology, that humans cooperate on larger scales than other species and that culture is an important facilitator of such cooperation. We use recently collected data to examine Ik culture and its influence on Ik behaviour. Turnbull's observations of selfishness were not necessarily inaccurate but they occurred during a severe famine. Cooperation re-emerged when people once again had enough resources to share. Accordingly, Ik donations in unframed Dictator Games are on par with average donations in Dictator Games played by people around the world. Furthermore, Ik culture includes traits that encourage sharing with those in need and a belief in supernatural punishment of selfishness. When these traits are used to frame Dictator Games, the average amounts given by Ik players increase. Turnbull's claim that the Ik have a culture of selfishness can be rejected. Cooperative norms are resilient, and the consensus among scholars that humans are remarkably cooperative and that human cooperation is supported by culture can remain intact.
Risk management is a problem humans have faced throughout history and across societies. One way t... more Risk management is a problem humans have faced throughout history and across societies. One way to manage risk is to transfer it to other parties through formal and informal insurance systems. One informal method of self-insurance is limited risk pooling, where individuals can ask for help only when in need. Models suggest that need-based transfer systems may require coordination and common knowledge to be effective. To explore the impact of common knowledge on social coordination and risk pooling in volatile environments, we designed and ran a Risk Pooling Game. We compared participants who played the game with no advance priming or framing to participants who read one of two texts describing realworld systems of risk pooling. Players in the primed games engaged in more repetitive asking and repetitive giving than those in the control games. Players in the primed games also gave more in response to requests and were more likely to respond positively to requests than players in the control games. In addition, players in the primed games were more tolerant of wide differences between what the two players gave and received. These results suggest that the priming texts led players to pay less attention to debt and repayment and more attention to the survival of the other player, and thus to more risk pooling. These results are consistent with findings from fieldwork in small-scale societies that suggest that humans use need-based transfer systems to pool risk when environmental volatility leads to needs with unpredictable timing. Models suggest that the need-based transfer strategy observed in this experiment can outperform debt-based strategies. The results of the present study suggest that the suite of behaviors associated with need-based transfers is an easily triggered part of the human behavioral repertoire.
Fitness interdependence is the degree to which two or more organisms influence each other's s... more Fitness interdependence is the degree to which two or more organisms influence each other's success in replicating their genes. Identity fusion may be a proximate mechanism that aligns behavior with fitness interdependence. Although identity fusion may usually lead to behaviors that are fitness enhancing, in evolutionarily novel environments, it may be hijacked in ways that are highly detrimental to fitness.
Understanding cooperation through fitness interdependence Some acts of human cooperation are not ... more Understanding cooperation through fitness interdependence Some acts of human cooperation are not easily explained by traditional models of kinship or reciprocity. Fitness interdependence may provide a unifying conceptual framework, in which cooperation arises from the mutual dependence for survival or reproduction, as occurs among mates, risk-pooling partnerships and brothers-in-arms.
economic processes and cultural norms. In the first section, we describe how inter-household wate... more economic processes and cultural norms. In the first section, we describe how inter-household water sharing can vary in different livelihood contexts. In the second section, we review the material conditions, socioeconomic processes, and cultural norms that shape water sharing across contexts. Finally, in the third section, we highlight key gaps and identify new directions for research on inter-household water sharing. Our goal is to provide an overview and state of knowledge on water sharing, and explore the proposition that water sharing, while often instrumental and need-based, may also symbolically mark the performance of social relations and cultural identities. Section 1: Water Sharing in Four Livelihood Contexts To start, we present an overview of water sharing among households in different livelihood contexts-hunter-gatherer, pastoral, agricultural, and urban-with some attention to their historical trajectories. This section gives concrete examples to illustrate the rich range of water sharing practices that exist globally. Further, these snapshots illustrate how cross-cutting factors (addressed in Section 2) shape water sharing practices in each context. Water sharing in hunter-gatherer livelihood contexts Human ancestors lived by hunting and gathering until the Holocene 10,000 years ago (Cummings et al., 2014); today, livelihoods based on hunting and gathering are increasingly integrated into mixed economies (e.g., BurnSilver et al., 2016). Hunter-gatherers have inhabited mostly seasonal niches from the Arctic to the southern-most points of the continents of South America, Africa, and Australasia. Historically, availability of water has been important for structuring the seasonal rounds of migration. Water may be fetched from wells, springs, rock pools, tree hollows, streams, lakes, or melted from ice or snow. Fetching may be done by women, men, or children, depending on the distance of the water distance from the settlement. Water sharing between households in many hunter-gatherer societies follows a norm that, like food, resources that are widely available and can be collected by any non-disabled person will be shared within the household and with guests (Gould, 1969). Close kin provide food and water for those who are old, sick, or suffering from sorrow, while all visitors to a household have access to water as basic hospitality (Wiessner, 1996). When water is readily available, it may be the case that no particular significance is placed on water sharing-in this way water is equated with life and shared like the air. By contrast, in desert environments such as the Kalahari of southern Africa, for example, when surface water or wells have run dry, households are expected only to provide for immediate kin in need (Silberbauer, 1981). The need for access to water sources in others' territories during times of scarcity has led to the development of some very complex social institutions in the Kalahari (Heinz & Keuthmann, 1994). For example, some Ju/'hoansi Bushman groups formed gift-giving partnerships called xaro that were passed down over generations so that xaro partners could visit one another and stay in each other's territories utilizing water and food resources until conditions improved at home (Wiessner, 1986). Water sharing relationships, then, may be formed within households, across households within a community or settlement, and across broader territories. Population growth, reduced mobility, environmental change (e.g., climate change, water diversions), and political change (e.g., fortification of international boundaries, land and water grabbing) may alter the abundance or quality of historic water sources such that many hunter-gatherers no longer have consistent access to clean water sources today. Yet, there is insufficient research to determine how such changes might affect water sharing in hunter-gatherer communities. Understanding the complex institutional arrangements and norms in these contexts presents a fruitful opportunity for future study. Water sharing in pastoral and agro-pastoral livelihood contexts For millennia, pastoralists have migrated with their livestock in search of pasture and water (Smith, 2013). Migration has long served as a coping strategy to deal with inherent intermittent resource scarcities common in rangeland ecosystems. But over the last few decades, pastoral livelihoods have transformed for a number of reasons, including increasing pressure to sedentarize, land enclosure, and
Because parental care is expected to depend on the fitness returns generated by each unit of inve... more Because parental care is expected to depend on the fitness returns generated by each unit of investment, it should be sensitive to both offspring condition and parental ability to invest. The Trivers-Willard Hypothesis (TWH) predicts that parents who are in good condition will bias investment towards sons, while parents who are in poor condition will bias investment towards daughters because high-quality sons are expected to out-reproduce high quality daughters, while low-quality daughters are expected to out-reproduce low quality sons. We report results from an online experiment testing the Trivers-Willard effect by measuring implicit and explicit psychological preferences and behaviorally implied preferences for sons or daughters both as a function of their social and economic status and in the aftermath of a priming task designed to make participants feel wealthy or poor. We find only limited support for predictions derived from the TWH and instead find that women have strong pre...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Sep 10, 2018
Human foragers are obligately group-living, and their high dependence on mutual aid is believed t... more Human foragers are obligately group-living, and their high dependence on mutual aid is believed to have characterized our species' social evolution. It was therefore a central adaptive problem for our ancestors to avoid damaging the willingness of other group members to render them assistance. Cognitively, this requires a predictive map of the degree to which others would devalue the individual based on each of various possible acts. With such a map, an individual can avoid socially costly behaviors by anticipating how much audience devaluation a potential action (e.g., stealing) would cause and weigh this against the action's direct payoff (e.g., acquiring). The shame system manifests all of the functional properties required to solve this adaptive problem, with the aversive intensity of shame encoding the social cost. Previous data from three Western(ized) societies indicated that the shame evoked when the individual anticipates committing various acts closely tracks the m...
DESPOTISM AND DIFFERENTIAL REPRODUCTION: A DARWINIAN VIEW OF HISTORY by Laura L. Betzig Hawthorne... more DESPOTISM AND DIFFERENTIAL REPRODUCTION: A DARWINIAN VIEW OF HISTORY by Laura L. Betzig Hawthorne, New York: Aldine, 1986. 171 pp., $24.95
Ethnology an International Journal of Cultural and Social Anthropology, 2002
Between 1925 and 1936, the Mukogodo of Kenya changed from Cushitie-speaking foragers to Maa-speak... more Between 1925 and 1936, the Mukogodo of Kenya changed from Cushitie-speaking foragers to Maa-speaking pastoralists. This rapid transition took place in the midst of competing views of Mukogodo ethnic identity. To Maa-speakers, Mukogodo were lowstatus il-tnrrobo. To British colonialists, Mukogodo were true Dorobo, victims of more powerful agricultural and pastoralist groups. Although British administrators fashioned a set of policies designed to protect Mukogodo from such groups, other British policies inadvertently contributed to the Mukogodo acquisition of Maasai subsistence patterns, language, and culture. Mukogodo themselves strategically used a Dorobo identity to manipulate the British while striving to lose the stigma of the il-lorrobu label and achieve acceptance among Maa-speakers as true Maasai.
Uploads
Papers by Lee Cronk